According to India brand equity foundation, “India has 500 million population under the age bracket of 5–24 out of which approximate 37.4 million students enrolled for higher studies” India is known to be the country of young people in terms of demographics.
With a recent surge in internet users disrupted by Reliance JIO, there has been a sharp spur in online content consumption. For every query, people are searching it on Google, looking for possible solutions on YouTube.
Since March, the COVID19 pandemic has changed the outlook of the online education industry. Due to COVID-19 people prefer to stay and learn at home. We have seen a demonstrable rise in participation from students in online learning.
Now schools and colleges are witnessing newer models of online teaching through their enterprising education solutions. As per the latest article in the business wire on April 2020, “Online education industry will be in India will be worth 360 Billion by 2024, with the compounded annual growth rate of ~43%”. This shows that the demand for online courses will also increase manifold.
There are plenty of opportunities available for freelance teachers, trainers, mentors, coaches & guides to start up. This would be the best time to set up your online coaching center and offer your skills in exchange for monetary value.
If you are planning to start your online coaching classes, this post is just for you.
Now the question is who all can offer their courses?
It could be anyone willing to teach some set of skill sets to their prospective students.
Skills like:
- Music / Art teaching
- Photography coaching
- Life / Personal Coach
- Yoga trainer or Fitness coach
- Software trainers
- Corporate trainer
- Business/sales trainers
- School curriculum based coaching like Secondary, Higher secondary, graduate schools
- Professional courses, Etc.
It’s very easy to set up your virtual class now!
Here is how you start your online coaching classes:
1. Register your domain name & hosting
Your domain name creates your first impression. A good short, clear, concise domain name makes a positive impression. It makes your coaching center legit. Your domain name defines your personal brand. Try to keep your domain name unique. When you are setting up your personal brand, it’s a good practice to start with your personal name. You can also set up based on your existing brand as well. Try to register under .com .in .net .org .co which are pretty much famous. Other domain name extensions like .yoga .blog .online are actually lengthy and not perceived well in the Indian audience.
An ideal domain name costs around ₹700 to ₹900 only. You can choose to register it from big rock or GoDaddy, wherever you are comfortable
For Eg:
Divyayoga.com
Udaycoaching.com
vinayteacher.in
mumbaicooking.net
aryansings.co
24x7fitness.in
gymfromhome.in
learnsports.org
Note: These are just random examples, I am not affiliated to these domain names.
It is okay to register such domain names. After all, it’s your brand. It’s who you are and what you do. Always keep it simple, easy to understand.
For hosting you can start with the essentials/starter / basic package with minimal space limited email address. We can always upgrade whenever your traffic to the website explodes. Always consider Indian data centers to purchase hosting as your target audience is in the same country and you will be getting traffic from here.
2. Set up your website
Your website will do most of your job. It will tell your users about you, about your offerings and it will help them to get in touch with you. You do not need to learn coding to build a website. It can be done at a few clicks only through WordPress. It is the most widely used content management system.
It’s time to install WordPress. You can connect with your hosting provider and ask them for support to install WordPress. It is very simple. You can also do it from the control panel of your hosting account. Check out YouTube videos on how to install WordPress hosting here.
Login to your WordPress admin panel, choose a good theme related to your business, and install it on WordPress. To check themes, Login to your WordPress administrator panel, Go to appearances, Click on themes, Click on add new and search for your industry keyword. Choose your preferred theme, install and activate it. There are many tutorials available with the theme designer to configure your website.
Do not design it too jazzy. It has to be simple and easy to understand. It has to be blazing fast. Hold your horses and limit your imagination of using 100 images and animations. Create a simple image sliders only if required. Try to select the SEO optimized theme. My personal favorite is “Astra” WordPress theme. It is search engine optimized, super-fast to load and pretty decent features to explore. you can also explore Generatepress WordPress theme.
Your ideal trainer website includes the following pages:
About page: Write down a brief about yourself. Your about pag
e will create credibility. A perfect about page includes your introduction, your achievements, your experience, your current clientele, and reviews. It should answer the dilemma to trust or not.
Services Page: You can include your offerings as in courses you offer with a brief on each one of them. If you are offering consulting / one to one coaching services, you can also include them.
If there are a handful of services, you can mention a complete course structure, what they will be learning from you, how your course can benefit them.
Remember, after every service offering, there will be a call to action which would redirect them to buy your courses or services online.
Blog Page: Create a high-quality blog page with long-form content. You must publish a minimum of 5 pillar posts on your blog. By pillar posts, I mean it could be something which users would love to read. Your posts will help them to gain some industry insights, some tips, or quick tricks to solve their problems, get value out of it. These blog posts would create stickiness to your website and compel them to check out your courses. You can also link your call to actions after every blog post in the end.
Quick Tip: Your Home page can be our blog page as well.
Contact Page: Your contact page would include a simple contact form where visitors can leave behind any comment or queries they have.
Payment Link: Register yourself on good Indian payment gateways such as Razorpay or Instamojo. I usually prefer Razorpay because of its advanced features and analytics. Registration and on-boarding are hassles free on either of them. You just need to do online KYC and complete verification of your account.
Start building landing page of each of your coaching offerings on payment gateway service. You will get the unique link for each of your coaching services. You can integrate those links with a simple button of “Click here to buy” which will land on your payment gateway service landing page.
Tools for your coaching center website: Various tools will help you to manage your coaching business more efficiently.
Convert kit: This tool will help you to create your subscriber’s list. Once the visitor enters into your email list. You can start with a drip marketing sequence of email campaigns to nurture them and ultimately leads to buy your services online.
Google Analytics & Search console: Use this tool to understand traffic analysis and your website performance on search engines. It would be interesting to see what kind of traffic your website is generating and where you can improve. Search console would give you a brief performance report of your site on Google search engine.
Mashshare: Use this plugin to enable visitors to share your content. You can configure this content from the plugin settings page.
There are many more tools which are available and you can do wonders from them. For any assistance comment down your queries.
3. Set up your coaching delivery
Once the prospective student has visited your website, purchased your online course. You would have to teach them. Now how do you do it? You cannot teach an individual student who has purchased online. This would be out of your bandwidth capacity. You need a system that can run on autopilot. As soon as your customer is purchasing your coaching service, He should be enrolled for a particular course. His course material should be delivered in their inbox with sufficient reminders of step by step course completion. It should also generate automated certificates. Your student should be able to leave a review or comment on the course he just finished. There should be a guide during the course completion process.
There are learning management solutions that are capable of such types of automation. One of them is thinkific. Sign up on this platform to create a library of your coaching. This is like a virtual one to one classroom, where you will be teaching them through interactive videos and quizzes.
Steps to configure your online coaching center:
— Sign up for thinkific
— Complete your trainer profile
— Record your videos
— Create a course structure
— Upload one by one video for each module
— Create quizzes and exams if needed
— Set up your certifications
Check if everything is working fine. Sign up for the demo course yourself.
Integrate your payment gateway (Instamojo or Razorpay) with your Learning Management Software (Thinkific) and make it easy for your prospective students to buy your course online. You can set up webhooks through zapier to automate your course delivery directly into the user’s inbox. Remember, the more you automate the buying process, the better the user experience it will be. Leveraging marketing automation can be a great help for you especially when you are running your business alone. It’s like value-added support you have so that you can focus more on your core skills. With this automation, you can build, set up once, selling multiple times.
4. Market your online coaching classes
You don’t need a lot of money just to get started. Focusing on free proven strategies could be enough to generate a few leads initially. Create social media handles on your coaching business name. Be omnipresent on all the channels. Be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etc. It’s always good to block your channels everywhere. Create perfectly crafted social media profiles optimized with the call to action of buying your course and start posting.
Your social media posting will help you in spreading the word around.
You can also leverage your existing students to spread the word out. There is a fair chance of possibility that they end up buying your course. Once you have an initial few customers, you can put your hands on Facebook ads to generate leads based on your target audience. New business depends on the type of relationship you maintain with your prospects. As soon as a lead is generated put them into the email marketing funnel and keep on sending them free course snippets in video, audio, text, image formats. At the end of the email, there will be a call to action to buy your complete course on your perfect landing page. marketing.
Remember to Automate everything! Summary of how to start your online coaching classes in 5 steps:
1. Build online presence
Register your domain name
Set up your website
Create your about page, contact page, blog posts and brief of your services
Optimize your website
Social Media
2. Your virtual classroom
Subscribe for learning management system
Create a course structure & Content
Record videos & Upload
Optimize and Price your course
3. Deliver your courses
Register for payment gateways
Automate your course delivery after payments
Help your students during the course
Set up reminders
4. Marketing your online courses
Build your landing page
Content Freebies as lead magnets
Social Media Marketing
Organic Traffic & Paid Ads
Generate leads
Outreach Email list & Cold Mailers
Drip Marketing Sequence
Transact
5. Learn & correct your course of action
These are basic steps to gather comprehensive understanding of the process. There is much more to create, optimize and convert.